


Make Me Feel Like I'm Lost

by dramatispersonae



Series: As One Door Closes [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Mind Control, Canon-Typical Psychological Manipulation by Eldritch Forces, Could Be Considered Fix-It Depending On Your Definiton Of 'Fix', Dubiously Consensual Friendships, Gaslighting Sort Of, Humor, It/Its Pronouns for The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), Mary Keay's A+ Parenting, Modified But Still Canonical Character Death, Other, Possessive Behavior, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22635088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramatispersonae/pseuds/dramatispersonae
Summary: Gerry meets a door that is not a door. And a person that is not a person. Remarkably, he does not get eaten. He would probably like to keep it that way. (Or, in the process of trying to avoid death by nightmare hallway, Gerard Keay accidentally charms the nightmare hallway)
Relationships: Gerard Keay/Michael, Gerard Keay/The Distortion
Series: As One Door Closes [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1762957
Comments: 95
Kudos: 501





	Make Me Feel Like I'm Lost

**Author's Note:**

> *throws confetti* welcome to the HYPERFIXATION HOLE. the SPECIAL INTEREST SWAMP. the PODCAST PIT. the MONSTER MASH. title is from the Of Monsters and Men song [Sleepwalker](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ofmonstersandmen/sleepwalker.html). the tags are also the warnings. if you want to know who dies before you continue reading, check the next set of notes. this is a gerrydistortion fic/prospective fic series, so if you're looking for gerry and michael shelley, or a distortion that actually is michael shelley in any sense beyond having his memories and body (which does not actually make them the same person), this is probably not your fic. if you're looking for gerry and a horrible nightmare hallway (who is significantly more than it appears) that has been cursed to inhabit a human form, this might very well be your fic! many thanks to [aromantic-eight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rbmifan/pseuds/aromantic-eight) for being such a good beta reader that i'm actually learning to catch and fix my own goofs.

Gerry thinks he might be just about done with the concept of holidays. Going on holiday is supposed to be a break from the pressures of life. You leave all your problems at home and yes, they'll still be there waiting for you when you get back, but at least you can leave them.

Gerry cannot leave his problems. Gerry's problems follow him. And everywhere he goes, he collects new problems with the same root causes as the old ones: there are alien Powers feeding on humanity, and Gerry _doesn't know how to leave well enough alone_.

"Hey," he says, tapping the shoulder of a person about to fit their keys into the lock of a door that somehow seems perfectly normal despite being lime green and set in a low wall with, as far as Gerry can tell, nothing behind it. Gerry has no doubt that the keys would have fit. And that the keys were made for a different lock. "Had a bit too many? That's my door."

"Oh," the person says. "Terribly sorry, really." They turn around, and the faint, disoriented haze fades from them as they walk out of the alley. Not marked, not specifically, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The place that Gerry is in now.

Good for him.

The door creaks open, and Gerry considers whether it might be wise to turn and leave the alley. Not run — he knows better than to run from a predator without a head start — but maybe he could briskly walk away, like he didn't see the door, hear the door, anything.

Nah. It's probably too late for that. He lights a cigarette instead, and waits. 

The door sits fully open, inviting and inert. Gerry gets the impression that it is also waiting. Trying to outwait a door seems absurd, but absurdity is standard in these sorts of situations.

Behind the door is a corridor that is definitely not behind the wall. So, about what he expected, even if the way it looks is… unique. The corridor has a yellow carpet with a black rug down the middle that puts Gerry in mind of a tongue, though he's not sure if he would see it that way if he weren't so very, very aware of the fact that he's looking at a mouth. The wallpaper is a pale blue that almost goes with the carpet but definitely doesn't go with the door, and it's got a hypnotic, swirling pattern that has Gerry leaning closer and almost taking a step forward before he gets ahold of himself and takes another drag on his cigarette. He exhales, deliberately, through the doorway.

The smoke shimmers like a mist of water droplets before breaking apart and dissipating. Gerry hears laughter. It's either very far away, or very quiet.

Last chance to try running.

Gerry lights another cigarette off the embers of his first one and drops the smoldering end to the ground outside the door. Maybe whatever is coming will step on it. A small, petty moment of revenge on the thing that may very well kill him.

Gerry has decided to be okay with that. He's going to do his best not to get killed. He doesn't actually want to die. But there are so many worse things that could happen to him, and dying here would make sure none of them came to pass.

Going back to Pinhole Books. Facing the ghost of his mum when she manages to pull herself together again. Just to give a few examples.

The laughter comes closer, or gets louder — it echoes back on itself in such a way that it's impossible to determine where it's coming from, beyond 'the corridor.' Maybe the corridor itself is laughing.

Maybe not.

At the very end of the corridor, where the faint leftwards curve is finally enough to take it around the wall, Gerry sees a figure, tall and wavering. Possible to mistake for human, maybe, if it weren't for literally everything else about the situation. And the closer it gets, the harder it would be to make that mistake. The not-quite-there quality of it does not fade as it gets closer. It increases. Gerry's eyes can't process what they're seeing, or maybe they don't want to, or maybe _he_ doesn't want them to. He can tell that whatever it is, it has hands. He can't ignore that. The hands are one of the easiest parts to focus on, enormous and, he notices as the thing gets closer, swollen-looking, with long and oddly bent fingers. The fingers are sharp. Very sharp. His awareness of how sharp they are is too clear for it to be purely visual information. Something about this thing puts the knowledge directly into his mind, solid and unignorable.

And then it's there, at the threshold of the door but not quite out of the corridor, and it is easy to mistake for human. Almost impossible not to. It looks like another tourist, with curly blonde hair and pale, freckled skin, wearing a shirt covered in indefinable pastel patterns, neon blue joggers, and red sandals. It clashes terribly with the corridor, and the door, and any decent sense of aesthetics. 

It doesn't belong in the corridor. It belongs outside. Gerry should help it out, make sure it wasn't followed by whatever really lives in the corridors…

He pulls his thoughts back sharply. No. It does belong there. Maybe it's the lure, or maybe it uses the corridors to trap its victims, but it is nothing that Gerry should trust.

Definitely too late to run.

"Hey," Gerry says.

"Hello," the thing says. "Would you like to come in?"

"Not really," Gerry says.

"Hm," the thing says. It leans against the wallpaper, which at some point became orange. Much worse than the blue. "A pity. It seems wasteful to have a door you never use, wouldn't you agree?"

" _Have_ a door?" Gerry asks, and then he remembers what he said to the person to send them away.

Shit.

"Is this not your door?" the thing asks. Gerry tries to think quickly, to determine whether relinquishing his statement of ownership or doubling down on it would be worse. Neither are good options, he knows that much.

"Is it yours?" Gerry asks, and the thing laughs. The echo, apparently, was not just from the acoustics of the corridor.

"There seems to be a competing claim," the thing says.

"Huh," Gerry says. He does not say anything else. He wants to say something else, and that just solidifies his belief that saying something else would be a very bad idea. He's pretty sure he knows what this thing is. Generally speaking. The only other Power that it could be is the Stranger, but it doesn't feel Stranger. Too few clowns. Not enough skinnings.

This is the Spiral.

Lucky him.

"So you're not going to come in," the Spiral thing says. It sounds… disappointed. How tragic, Gerry's hurting it's feelings by not wanting to get eaten.

"Eh," Gerry says, and shrugs. The Spiral takes certainty and makes it wrong. It takes doubts and makes them real. It plays with your mind and your feelings. So the best thing to feel is nothing, and the best thing to do is 'as little as possible,' because he can't trust that his actions will truly be what he thinks they are. He decides against lighting a third cigarette. He just drops the remains of his current one and grinds it out under his heel. Ordinarily he would pick it up, but in addition to having no guarantee he's not actually beating someone to death with a rock when he thinks he's gathering his litter, he doesn't feel like bending over and presenting his back as a target to the monster before him. Spiral things don't usually make a grab for you unless you're well and truly trapped, but no one ever lived long expecting consistency from the Spiral.

"Are you sure?" it asks.

"Eh," Gerry says. He feels himself gravitating towards the open door, and pointedly leans away from it, pretending to stretch.

"No curiosity? No desire to see what might be inside?"

He is curious. He's been curious. There is an insatiable part of him that always wants to know _more_. And one of the things it wants to know is what it would be like to really fall into a monster's trap, rather than just guessing based on the bodies or the shaken accounts of survivors. Had it been eating at him before he began invoking the Eye to improve his ability to hunt these things down, to recognize their passage? Is that why he chose the Eye to assist his work rather than the Hunt, despite the Hunt being the obvious choice? Gerry would like to think it's because he's smarter than that, because of how the Hunt creeps into every aspect of your life and compels you to chase long past the point when you should give up, but the Eye creeps in, too. It's subtle. It makes you look too long. Wonder too much.

You can't deal with the Powers without them taking over more and more of your life. All you can do, short of not getting involved, which it is far too late for, is try to hold them back. Keep them contained to the bits of your life they've already eaten and keep them from taking bites of more. Don't let them push you further than you know you should go.

He already knows everything he needs to about what's inside the door, Gerry tells himself firmly. It's Spiral hell. "Eh."

"Trying not to lie to me?" it asks, amused.

He shrugs again. Yeah, he's trying not to lie, since the Spiral deals in lies and who knows what lying to it could prompt, but mainly because he's trying to do as little as possible. Every time he opens his mouth he can feel words crowding at the base of his tongue, ready to fling themselves into the waiting air. He's sure this thing wants him to talk. And he doesn't want to do anything that this thing wants him to, because he's sure that would have consequences he could never anticipate.

But really, what's the harm in talking? He hasn't been hurt, he hasn't been threatened, he's probably just being paranoid…

 _Good_. Paranoia is good. Paranoia is positively correlated with survival. Gerry bites the inside of his cheek and squeezes it between his teeth.

The Spiral thing tilts its head, and its curls bounce a little. There is something not quite right about the way they move. "I can't tell if you're more fun than my usual guests, or less." The last two words are utterly devoid of affect, flat and cold, and the sudden switch from its earlier tone sends a freezing jolt down Gerry's back.

It would be in his best interest, maybe, to be interesting.

"I'll be going, then," Gerry says, in the least interesting voice he can muster. He can't trust his thoughts. But does that mean he can't trust the thought that he can't trust his thoughts? What should he be doing? What shouldn't he be doing? How does he tell what's him, and what's this… thing? Is any of it this thing, or does he just think it is? Is any of it _him_?

His head hurts.

"I don't want you to," it says, and smiles. For a moment, Gerry thinks it has too many teeth, all of them sharp.

That's stupid. Who looks at someone's mouth and knows instantly whether they have the right amount of teeth? Gerry can't even remember what the right amount of teeth is. Thirty… two? No, it should be divisible by four. No, thirty-two is divisible by four, so that could work.

The Spiral thing holds both its hands out, palms towards Gerry. Its hands are normal. He knows its hands aren't normal. Or was before the illusion, and now the reality? "Is there anything I can offer you to reconsider?"

"Dunno, how are you with ghosts?" Gerry says.

Fuck.

The Spiral thing's eyes light up. It's mostly a figure of speech. "Oh, ghosts! Do you want me to make some?"

"Please don't," Gerry says. No. No no no, he shouldn't have spoken, he shouldn't be speaking. Why is he speaking? Stemming the flow of words feels like trying to hold in a cough, an uncomfortable and inexorable pressure in his throat. He feels like he's choking, struggling to draw breath against the pressing need to speak. If he passes out from lack of air, will that save him from speaking? Or will his mouth just go without his consciousness to guide it?

That would be bad. He needs to make that not happen. He needs to speak, but on his terms.

"Unmake some?"

"You could offer that," Gerry says, switching tactics from 'say nothing' to 'agree to nothing'. Sometimes Spiral things like to play word games, and sometimes they like when you play back. He's hoping that 'playing' with this one doesn't immediately escalate into 'hell vortex hallway death.' He's hoping that this is one of those situations where giving in a little saves you from giving in more down the line, and not one where giving in a little sends you over the edge.

"I could," it agrees. "But how does one of the Eye's little toys end up with ghost problems that it can't solve on its own?"

Good question. If he let the Eye in further, maybe he could figure out how to stop his mum haunting him. He doesn't think her pages will burn. Leaving herself vulnerable to fire would kind of defeat the point of trying to be beyond death, especially when she herself had burnt skin pages she deemed useless or simply used up. He hasn't thought of many other ideas. None he's confident enough in to try. The price of trying something and not having it work is too high, since if it doesn't work, she'll still be there, and she'll _know_ he tried to destroy her.

The Eye could tell him what would work. Maybe. If it felt like doing so. If he was willing to pay whatever price it demanded, forever. "Not the Eye's."

"Really," it says, pointedly sweeping its gaze along Gerry's exposed skin and, therefore, Gerry's exposed tattoos.

"Yeah," Gerry says. It's not a lie. The Eye might be tugging at him, he might be walking a razor's edge to gain the ability to recognize the work of the Powers and chase down their victims and creatures and artefacts without being consumed himself, but he doesn't belong to it. Not yet. Not ever, if he can help it.

"Do you want me to unmake a ghost?"

"Hm," Gerry says, noncommittal. "I'd like some time to think about it." He'd like some time away from the Spiral thing, so he _can_ think. He feels muddied. Suspicious. He has no idea how much of that is the Spiral thing's influence. He'd like to say all of it is, but the Spiral knows how to push, how to set things just on edge enough that your mind does all the rest of the work of pulling itself apart.

"Okay," it says easily.

"... okay?"

"Okay," it confirms. "I'll give you some time to think it over. When you're ready to talk, I'll find you."

Ah. Ominous.

"Sure," Gerry says. Then he wants, very badly, to kick himself. That was an agreement. He agreed to something. He agreed to the Spiral thing _finding him later_. That's enough to leave him marked for sure.

"Goodnight," the Spiral thing says cheerfully. "I do look forward to speaking with you again."

The door creaks shut and disappears. Gerry watches the space where it was for a little longer, then puts his head in his hands. "I am a dumb, dead bastard," he says.

* * *

Gerry knows a decent amount about the Powers. About _all_ of them. Jack of all trades, belonging (technically) to none. He uses this knowledge to steal their things, destroy their things, and not get destroyed by them, in about equal measure. So far, the best way he has found to not get destroyed is to avoid their direct notice. It's kind of too late for avoiding them entirely, and it's been too late for that since before he was born, but at the very least he tries not to make enough noise and commotion that they start actively hunting him. Tried. He's pretty much blown that now. 

Gerry does not know how to deal with the current situation. Not even after he gets his version of a full night's sleep, which means alternating between screwing around on his laptop and making the barest, most pitiful attempts at laying down and not thinking before finally passing out a few hours before sunrise and not waking again until the afternoon. Failing to have come upon any revelations in his sleep, he puts his boots back on and walks around the town for a while. When he starts to get shaky, he buys a coffee, a bagel, and a sack of mixed seeds, and eats the bagel while he looks for a promising bird-feeding bench.

It's not precisely true that he doesn't know how to deal with this. It's more that he doesn't know how to get out of this in a way that maintains anything like his status quo. Burn a Leitner, trespass in some spooky architectural ruin, that's normal. Getting a new set of scars or a new set of nightmares is normal. There is, he is sure, no way to come back from this the same. There is no way to undo what he's done. A split second idiot decision to turn a stranger away from a door, an even dumber decision to do so by claiming the door as his own, and then the ongoing stupid decision to not try running away before the Spiral hands-monster thing showed up has landed him in something he can't run from. And isn't that just how it always is, with the Powers? You make choices you don't understand the gravity of, and then you're caught in their orbit.

He could still try running away, he supposes, following the sidewalk into a sparse park. It would be a wildly delayed reaction, likely utterly pointless, but he could. And he's not going to. He _doesn't_ run away, not successfully. He's been trying to run away since he was a kid, and if he was ever going to improve at it, he would have by now.

So. Other options. He sits down on a cold bench overlooking a tiny pond. There are no ducks, but there are a few pigeons roving around the area. Gerry chucks a handful of seeds across the path. Suddenly there are far more pigeons. He throws more seeds, hoping to spread the pigeons out a bit so they stop stepping on and slapping each other, but apparently they prefer being an awkward mass of bodies.

He could see if the protections from the Eye are enough to give him half a chance of surviving the corridors, if the Spiral thing manages to get him through the door. The Eye and the Spiral aren't quite as antagonistic as the Web and the Desolation, and certainly not as antithetical as the Vast and the Buried, but the Spiral doesn't like to be known. Of course, that also means it's hard to look at, hard to pin down, so it could potentially overwhelm and cancel out the Eye's power.

Gerry doesn't have a lot of confidence in what Eye powers he's managed to acquire while stubbornly resisting being fully claimed versus the power of whatever the hell the Spiral thing is. If it were human, or even largely human, maybe. But Gerry is confident in saying that either it's gone so far from human that it no longer qualifies or it was _never_ human. Something about it feels… big. Wrong. Deeper and darker and stronger and more other than anything could ever be and still count as human.

And that's just the hands monster. The corridors are also very, very bad. Assuming they're not the same, somehow. They felt congruous. Connected.

So relying on the Eye is definitely not a good Plan A. Not even a good Plan B. More of a 'if everything else goes horribly wrong, maybe this will buy me a few extra minutes of life.' He really ought to avoid the corridors entirely, and have as little contact with the Spiral thing as possible.

Which, of course, means that he really shouldn't tell it any more about his mum's ghost. Even though he does think that it's possible that the Spiral thing could actually destroy her pages.

Would that be worth it?

Of course it would be worth it, he thinks bitterly, sinking back onto the cold bench. He was ready to go to jail in exchange for being free of what his mother had done to him in life. Getting eaten in exchange for being free of what his mother has done to him in death seems… if not fair, then fitting. She did tell him that falling to one of the Powers would mean his death. It certainly meant hers, the terror of mortality driving her to flay herself alive and bind herself into one of the End's books.

But the Spiral isn't the only thing that could destroy the pages. Putting aside the question of fair trades, if he was actually willing to sacrifice his life, or his humanity, in order to end his mother's ghost, he would have pledged himself to the Eye already. The idea of it feels faintly absurd. The Eye just… watches. It didn't help his dad, in the end. It didn't help his grandmother. He knows a little about the turnover rate of Archive assistants, since it's good practice to stay aware of all the little lairs of the Powers around, and the Eye certainly didn't save any of them. What can it really do for him?

But he's got the tattoos. He _knows_ he's already drawn to the Eye in some way, though he's been resisting it for a while. The fact that he's suddenly having trouble grasping the appeal just tells him that his mind has been contaminated by the Spiral.

So that's not great.

The obvious reaction to that is to reject any positive feelings towards the Spiral, anything that inclines him to trust the monster in the corridor. But if he pushes himself too far in the opposite direction, he may end up running into another trap. The Spiral doesn't just fool the mind into thinking dangerous things are safe. It also fools the mind into thinking safe things are dangerous, until you're so overwhelmed with fear you fall into it and you never, ever get back out.

Fucking Spiral. Why couldn't Gerry have accidentally caught the attention of something straightforward, like the Flesh? He's made of meat and it's gross, oh no. Gerry can deal with that. But he's always needed his mind. He's always relied on it, to some degree. He's not a genius or anything, he's not obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge, but he wants to understand things. He likes to be able to break them down and lay them out.

That's part of what drew him to the Eye, isn't it?

Yeah. Gerry likes to know things. He thinks it's important to know things. The Eye gives him that. The Eye could give him…

Nope. Not going there. God, it's like trying to drag himself out of the ocean using a rope tied to a rocket. He lets go too soon, he sinks, he holds on too long, he goes shooting into the upper atmosphere. Neither of those would be good for his survival prospects.

Why couldn't his mum have pressured him to go to law school or med school or something like a _normal_ controlling parent? At least regular anatomy textbooks don't take over your mind and body when you read them, and there are no ancient and terrible alien forces of tax codes. 

Maybe that's debatable. But it's not the same, is the point. Gerry would be happy to trade his current sort of problems for this other sort. At the very least, you can see a therapist for the trauma of being forced into a high-powered, high-stress but ordinary career. Therapy about the trauma of being raised in a world of fear, pain, and death, expected to not only understand the impossibly foreign and incomprehensible entities reaching into his world but to figure out how to use them? About how he watched his mum continue to cut off her own skin while bleeding to death and that _wasn't_ the last he saw of her? Nah. Not happening.

Gerry realizes he feels more clearheaded than he has since he saw the door. For a certain value of clearheaded, anyway — he's full of blurry, indistinct emotional pressure, the theoretical awareness that he's having feelings and that those feelings suck without the ability to really process his emotions at all. That's what happens when he thinks too much about his life, about his mum. But he doesn't feel the seductive influence of the Spiral or the Eye winding through his thoughts. He still feels their pull, but it's easier to identify, to push out.

… if the trick to insulating himself against them is to stew in his personal traumas, Gerry's going to be _so_ angry. It makes a certain amount of sense, personal secrets that feel unreal and hyper-real as a nice balancing point between the Eye and the Spiral, but he hates it.

He's also going to take this clarity and run with it.

He's marked by the Spiral. He was already sort of marked by the Eye. They're fairly strongly opposed Powers. Not the most strongly opposed, but also not so utterly opposite that they define themselves by the absence of each other, which is its own form of closeness. But he can't count on one to save him from the other, because that's just its own form of succumbing, and he _won't_. He needs to rely on himself, except his self is what the Eye and the Spiral are playing tug of war with, so it's not as simple as that.

Maybe he's thinking too big. Treating this as a contest between the Spiral and the Eye when all it really needs to be is a contest between Gerry and the monster in the corridors. What does he know about it?

It wanted to talk to him.

As another way to trip him up and mess with his awareness, maybe, but Gerry doesn't think most monsters are big on talking. They don't have to hold a conversation with you to fuck with your head. A lot of them like isolation, the unique fear that comes from knowing that there is no one to speak to, no one to help you, no connection to be had. It's not just the Lonely. Devastation means the loss of anything that could console you, death means a severance from all that you know, fear of the other is the absence of what should be kinship, et cetera. Solitude adds spice to all kinds of fears, so throwing that away by initiating conversation is meaningful.

Gerry wonders if it's lonely.

A stupid thought. But it could be, couldn't it? Just because monsters are monsters doesn't mean they don't have feelings. Not the usual set in the usual ways, maybe, but there's still something.

So that's leverage. A counteroffer. If Gerry goes through the door and gets eaten, he's not going to be able to offer companionship of any meaningful sort. If the Spiral turns him inside out and makes him an extension of itself, he'll just be another part of it, a reflection in a different mirror.

Supposing that even matters to this thing. But Gerry gets the sense that it does, somehow. Or it could. If he can figure out how to seem more interesting alive and himself rather than dead or consumed.

* * *

The problem with running away to a little town in the countryside where there's nothing to do is that _there's nothing to do_. Gerry chose his vacation destination because it was cheap to get to and boring enough that he didn't think his mum would look for him there. When he runs away but doesn't leave the country, he can't go places with things he'd obviously enjoy. No concerts, no notable attractions, not even a notable shopping mall. That would make it too easy for her. Probably. If she even looks for him at all, and doesn't just bide her time at the bookstore, knowing he can't stay away forever.

Technically, location shouldn't matter that much when he's trying to market himself as a worthwhile companion. It's about him, and convincing the hands monster he has values beyond nutritional. But god, what does he have to offer? Will it be enough that he doesn't say 'aah, a monster!' and run away?

Maybe. He can't imagine most of the people this thing encounters are in a state to be conversational, and the rest don't stay that way for long.

… he could get it a present, maybe? If the idea is to be a novelty. Convince the thing that he's interesting. He doubts anyone's given it a present before.

Food's right out, because he doesn't want it to encourage an association between him and food. He might be borrowing that bit of logic from tips he's read on interacting with wild animals, but it seems like a sound principle. After a bit of peering into the windows of shops, contemplating and rejecting several potential options, Gerry buys a stuffed bear. Horror movie makers go nuts for children's toys, maybe a horror movie creature will too.

Right. That just leaves… activities. Conversation. The delicate work of coming up with a convincing argument against getting eaten and presenting it to something that fucks with your mind in a way that makes speaking and remembering difficult.

He passes by the park again.

… would it still count as associating himself with food if he took the hands monster to feed the birds?

Better not to risk it.

He would let it decide what to do and save himself the trouble of figuring that bit out, if letting it decide didn't sound like a recipe for a tour of the corridor. But he doesn't know what people do with each other. Go... bowling? He imagines the Spiral thing gripping a bowling ball with its giant, distorted hands and snorts. Nah. Not bowling. But games, that seems like the right track. Entertainment.

He goes back to his room and runs a quick series of Google searches. Then he's ready.

Gerry heads back to the low wall where he saw the door. It seems like his best bet. The Spiral thing said that it would find him, but Gerry's trying to be proactive, mark himself as something that doesn't just respond but initiates. There's no door there, predictably, but Gerry knocks on the stone as if there were.

He hears a door creak open to his right and turns to face it, just in time to watch the door end its arc against the wall of the building it wasn't in before, the Spiral thing holding it open with one shouldn't-be-normal hand. "Back so soon?" it asks. "You were _quite_ eager to get away last night." Beneath its airy, playful tone is a faint hurt, and Gerry doesn't want to think about it. He doesn't want to think about whether it's feigning emotion to catch him off guard or whether it was actually upset by him leaving. He's in charge of this encounter. He's the one directing what happens.

"I got you this," Gerry says, and holds the bear out towards it.

The Spiral thing's eyes widen. Gerry is certain the expression on its face is surprise, though it looks… uneven? Definitely not quite how surprise usually looks on a human face. The way its eyes open seems less like emoting and more like it's trying to take in as much of what's happening as possible in order to better respond to it, a cat dumped out of its carrier in the middle of a new room. The comparison is made easier by the fact that its pupils do seem to be dilating, taking up more and more of its irises. When its pupils stop looking like they're expanding and start making Gerry feel like he's being sucked in, gazing into an infinite pattern that spins in on itself in endless iterations, he decides that maybe he should stop looking directly at the Spiral thing for a little bit. It's probably even safe to do so since, in the time he spent falling into it, the Spiral thing still hasn't moved or responded, gazing intently at the stuffed bear and nothing else. Gerry silently awards himself a point for doing something it clearly didn't expect. "You got me… a present?" it asks, hesitant.

"Yeah," Gerry says.

"Oh. Thank… you?" It tilts its head, leaving its neck limp and hanging at a decidedly unnatural angle. "Is that correct?"

"Yeah, that's good," Gerry says. The Spiral thing steps out of the doorway, which then isn't. It takes the bear from Gerry, turning it over and over in its hands. "So I've reconsidered."

"Oh?" the Spiral thing says, still looking at the bear.

"I don't want to get eaten."

"I see," it says. Coils of its hair slip over its ears, leaning gently towards the toy, and Gerry wonders if it has conscious control of its hair's motion. Is its hair a sensory apparatus? Is it dangerous? Not that that would even register on the scale of weird he's dealt with, or even weird he's currently dealing with, but it would be good to know if he should avoid the Spiral thing's hair. Especially because it looks like it would be not unpleasant to touch otherwise, and if it's actually some kind of tentacle knife deathtrap he'd like to be aware of that. "An understandable feeling, if not an _original_ one."

"Sometimes things are common because they work," Gerry says.

"It doesn't work forever," the Spiral thing says, and smiles. This smile seems to have the correct amount of teeth, and Gerry is so certain of that he becomes suspicious of his certainty and starts trying to count the Spiral thing's teeth before its lips close again. "Most things that are consumed don't want to be eaten."

"And sometimes not wanting to get eaten helps you get out of it. So here we are," Gerry says.

"Here we are," the Spiral thing says, but the way it says that gives Gerry a lurching feeling of total disorientation, like opening the door to his room and stepping into the center of a watermelon. Not just not being where he's thought he was, but being somewhere he never thought he _could_ be.

"Could you cut that shit out?" he demands. "I get it, you're a creature of the alien Power of madness and lies and mindfucks, good for you, but if you keep trying to make my head spin I'm going to throw up on your shoes."

The Spiral thing's eyes widen, and it laughs. Gerry is pretty sure he hears delight in the doubled, warbling sound. "I like you," it says. "I think I want to keep you."

"No thanks," Gerry says hastily. "I think I'm better when I'm not dead in a hallway." The Spiral thing makes a considering noise, and Gerry barrels ahead. This is as good an opportunity as he's likely to get to segway into his whole 'don't eat me' plan. "Have you ever been to an arcade?"

The Spiral thing tilts its head. "N-o?" it says, stretching the word out, unsure. "I have not. Not after becoming myself."

Alright. Gerry can try to figure out what that means later. It sounds like a no of some kind, so that's enough for him. "I'm going to take you to an arcade," he says. He eyes the wall where the door used to be. "You can follow me somewhere, right? You're not… I dunno, bound to the alleyway?" If it _is_ bound to the alleyway, then Gerry can ditch this whole plan and just hightail it back onto the street. The Spiral thing seems too powerful to be limited to an alleyway, but sometimes monsters get stuck. Trapped. Of course, usually that's because of the influence of something stronger, but sometimes stuff just goes wrong in ways that aren't in the Powers' favor for once.

"I can go anywhere there is," the Spiral thing says. "The only places I can't go are some of the places that are not."

"Well, I'm pretty sure I can't go places that 'are not' either, so that works out," Gerry says. He begins to walk out the alleyway, and the Spiral thing follows him. The further they get, the more real it seems, like it's pulling the waving immaterial wrongness under its skin. Gerry's able to actually focus on it now and retain details of its appearance beyond the general impression of 'tall with curly blond hair.' Even the night before, when he had been so convinced that it was a regular human who ought to be taken out of the doorway, he hadn't really been able to _see_ it. It existed in contrast to the corridor, an irregularity, an incongruence. Now it's mostly perceivable and almost normal, even though Gerry's Beholding-augmented senses and the part of his brain that's never gotten over being a tiny and snack-sized proto-mammal are telling him that he's within the reach of a predator.

Said predator is wearing a jumper with a pattern that looks like all the designs on every single disposable paper cup Gerry has ever seen, all at once. Its hair twists in uneven curls and waves down to its shoulders, and its round cheeks and slightly upturned nose are pink, like it can actually feel the cold. Maybe it can. That's the sort of detail a monster would be likely to miss when constructing a facade of humanity. It's still holding the bear, fingers pressing tightly into its plush body. Since the bear isn't leaking stuffing, Gerry will take that as evidence that the Spiral thing's fingers are only sharp when it wants them to be. Everything about it looks nonthreatening, which just makes the fact that it still emanates an unsettling energy worse. It makes Gerry doubt himself, though which set of perceptions he doubts he doesn't know.

That's the point, he guesses.

The arcade is small and dimly lit and mostly empty. It's late October, early evening, so probably the kids who would normally populate it are home, eating dinner or doing homework or something like that. Gerry's grasp of what normal people do with their lives is shaky. He's seen parents expect their kids to be home and do homework and eat dinner in the evenings on TV. Of course, that could easily be a fake TV thing, like being able to afford a giant, expensive flat in a nice part of London with no apparent income or inheritance at all. He wouldn't know either way.

The newer machines hiss and pop warningly as the Spiral thing moves past them, so Gerry picks up the pace, hustling further in to the assortment of analogue games. Hopefully that will be enough distance. Gerry would feel kind of bad if he was indirectly responsible for the other games exploding. Only kind of, though. He's trying not to get killed, and if he doesn't get killed he'll be able to protect other people from getting killed. So even if the games do explode, that's a really minor price to pay.

"Oh!" the Spiral thing says, and bounces past Gerry towards a collection of pinball machines.

Gerry accidentally makes eye contact with the unbelievably 80s wizard painted above one of the scoreboards. It has a very judgemental face, but Gerry's had worse. At least this weirdo in robes probably isn't capable of setting him on fire or trying to feed him to a puddle of shadowy darkness. Even if it was, Gerry's pretty clearly got a prior claim on him, and monsters can generally be trusted to get territorial over their meals.

Assuming the Spiral thing still plans to eat him. Right now it looks pretty fixated on the pinball machines. That means Gerry's plan is probably working, right? Seeing the way the thing's hands look in the reflections on the glass of the pinball machines, Gerry _really_ hopes so.

* * *

It's dark when they leave the arcade. At no point did the Spiral thing let go of the stuffed bear. To play pinball, it just tucked the bear under its arm, leaving its hands free. The scoreboard had started glitching within half an hour, but none of the machines caught on fire or started bleeding or displayed indecipherable messages of madness and despair, and the Spiral thing seemed perfectly happy to just play on the same pinball machine for over two hours.

Gerry is certain it was doing _something_ to the space inside the machine. After he put the first few coins in, the Spiral thing's game of pinball never needed to be reset. But it's not like he robbed the arcade of income, since Gerry had run through all his coins playing his own games of pinball. When he left to get more, the Spiral thing stopped playing and just stood at its machine. Waiting. It resumed playing as soon as Gerry returned, which is also a pretty clear indication that it was messing with the machine somehow. And that it was getting something out of not just playing at the arcade, but being around Gerry. Maybe. It didn't try to talk to him, and he didn't try to talk to it, but he was at least able to focus enough to be capable of playing pinball. It wasn't trying to unravel him. Tug on him a little, maybe, but whether the way the edges of his thoughts fuzzed out and faded once they left his grip was a deliberate effort on the Spiral thing's part and not just a side effect of being in proximity to it is unclear.

So the plan worked. Probably. Hopefully. Gerry is walking the Spiral thing back to its alleyway, so there is still a chance that the night will end with him getting pushed through the door into the hell hallways.

Gerry is beginning to think that he might be trying to die.

Maybe not as hard as he could be. He has the means and the knowledge and the opportunity to make it so that if he was absolutely set on dying he could do it in fairly short order. He doesn't want to do that. But the thing that repels him about the idea of deliberately offing himself isn't the idea of death or any desire to live, it's the idea of the effort it would take, comparatively minimal though it might be. So that's probably not a good sign.

It's not just that, though. It's the fear that killing himself won't make it be _over_. That he'd be dragged back, the way he's always been dragged back when he tries to escape, and then he'd have nowhere left to go. When he saw the door open on the corridor, he thought about how dying there would keep him out of the skin book. So maybe that's another part of it. His mum's proven that killing yourself can tether you to life with new and awful force. The comfort of suicide is just one more thing she's tainted.

… yeah, thinking of it as a comfort is definitely not a good sign.

They come to a stop in front of the alleyway. "Well," Gerry says. "This is your stop."

The Spiral thing tilts its head, uncomprehending.

"I'm, uh. Gonna go… do… something else?"

"What about your ghost?" the Spiral thing says.

"My what?" Gerry says.

"You reconsidered coming through my door. I offered to unmake a ghost if you did. I think… I like to keep deals." It smiles at him, close-lipped this time, no opportunities for any sort of guessing about its teeth. "Mostly."

"Oh. Uh." _I've reconsidered that too,_ he wants to say. But when he opens his mouth, he doesn't say that. He's only aware of the words he's saying as he says them. There is no thought beforehand, no conception of what his speech is but a retrospective one. "It's my mum. She bound herself in a book of the End, but it went wrong. She couldn't finish the ritual on her own. She was always… but she's worse now, and it's not ever going to get better."

The Spiral thing goes still. Completely. Gerry hadn't realized how much it gave the impression of motion until it stopped utterly. "Oh," it says. " _Mary_."

There's no question whether, through bizarre coincidence, it means a different Mary. So many things know her. Gerry doesn't recall ever seeing this one when she took him with her to meet with her many contacts and associates, but she could have known it from before he began travelling with her, or it could have been a meeting she didn't take him to. Or the Spiral thing could have looked completely different at the time. Somehow, it doesn't seem one for static forms, even though so far it's kept to variations on the one it has on now. "Yeah," he says.

"So you would be… Gerard?" it asks.

"Last I checked," Gerry says. He's not going to ask this thing to call him Gerry. Gerard works fine.

"Hm," it says. "You can call me Michael. And I," it opens a door that Gerry didn't see appear, "will unmake your ghost."

It steps through the doorway and is gone.

* * *

His mum is there when he gets home, rearranging some of the stacks of books. Sometimes rearranging them keeps the more volatile ones settled. Sometimes she just decides to change things around for her own reasons, seized by a sudden and ferocious energy with unpredictable demands. She doesn't look at him as he enters, doesn't stop what she's doing, doesn't even acknowledge him until he's taken his bag to his room and tossed it on the floor to unpack later.

"Did you enjoy your time away, Gerard?" she asks, her usual cruelty folded into her mocking imitation of normal family conversation. She's not angry. She used to be furious when he left. But now she's smug and secure in the fact that he came back the way he always does, the fact that no matter how many problems he causes when she's gone he still does what she wants when she's here.

"Not really," he says.

"Good for both of us that you cut it short, then," she says, and Gerry feels like he's shrinking inside his skin, collapsing into the spaces within his bones. His body too big and his self too small.

He had cut it short. Thoroughly unsettled by his interactions with Michael, especially the part where it _hadn't killed him_ , Gerry had decided it was time to be fully done with the concept of holidays and just go home. He doesn't like that she knows he planned to be gone for longer. He doesn't like thinking about how much she knows about him and how she knows it. "Yeah," he says.

"I hope you plan on doing laundry soon," she says. "If you're going to dress like that, your clothes ought to at least be clean."

"Sure," he says.

"I have a few questions about -"

There's a knock at the door. Gerry and his mum both pause.

"We'll talk later," she says.

His mum turns towards the stairs and walks down them briskly. Gerry debates the merits of hiding in his room before deciding that he might as well see what poor idiot managed to find their way to Pinhole Books this time, just so it's easier to track them down later and try to help them with their supernatural problems. Because he will. He knows it. The terror of his mum's responses is dulled by the fact that he knows that sooner or later, he will always prove himself a disappointment and suffer for it, so he might as well try to do what he thinks is right. But that knowledge also makes the weight of her disapproval heavier. Doing what she asks will not keep him safe, so he can do anything. Doing what she asks will not keep him safe, so there is nothing he can do.

The shape of whoever knocked is barely visible in the pane of frosted glass set in the middle of the pale wooden door. He really ought to see about replacing that door with something solid — what's the point of glass you can't see through? None of the benefits of clear glass and all of the fragility. It just invites a break-in. Not that any regular robbers would fare well in this house, but monsters can break through glass, too, and Gerry doesn't need to be making it easier for them. Stupid to have a glass door, really, which is why...

_That's not their door._

He realizes the moment before his mum opens it and Michael steps inside. It shouldn't have been able to do that - his mum always blocks the doorway with her body until people have proven that they're worth letting in. But he should know by now that Michael doesn't care about what it should and shouldn't be able to do.

His mum doesn't mistake it for human. Of course. As human as it looks at the moment, it's still wrong, and his mum has more than enough experience with the Powers and their followers and creatures to recognize that. But she levels a steely look at it and asks "Do you have an appointment?"

"An appointment?" it asks. "What an… interesting concept. I want to be here, and I am. Is that an appointment?"

"Usually people call in," his mum says.

"I'm not people," it says. It hasn't looked at Gerry yet, hasn't given any indication that it knows or cares that he's there. It's wearing a suit. A nice suit, too, three-piece, no eye-burning colors. Almost normal, aside from the fact that the black fabric has the same hypnotic pull as the corridor, and it makes Gerry acutely aware of the fact that black is an absence of color. Empty. Hollow and hungry.

"I can tell," his mum says. "What do you want?"

"I've come for a book," it says, and smiles.

Hollow and hungry.

"I don't have any of yours right now," his mum says, crossing her arms. "I rarely do. Your patron doesn't seem much for writing things down."

"Oh, it's not mine." Can't she see the vicious look, the way its edges waver and look too sharp all at once? Gerry feels a perverse, intense compulsion to warn her away from the thing that he summoned. That's his _mother_ , that's his mother facing down a monster and he's doing nothing.

But he can't move. He can't speak. And he knows that it's not just the indecision, or the way he sometimes shuts down around his mum. He doesn't feel leaden, insulated and isolated. Everything is sharp. Everything is clear. He can feel his own inability to speak like glass in his throat, words sliced to bits on their unforgiving edges. When he tries to talk anyway, all that comes out is a muted exhalation, so quiet his mum doesn't notice.

Michael does. Michael throws him a wink over his mum's head. And Gerry feels his mouth begin to move. The sound that comes out is just as inaudible, and the sensation of his lips pulling and stretching the skin of his face against his will so foreign that even if he was the kind of person who paid attention to what making various words felt like he wouldn't be able to recognize what he was saying. But he still knows, with the same clarity that he knew Michael's fingers would cut like knives, the kind that comes not from his senses but from being _given_ the information, what he is saying.

"We had a deal," Gerry's mouth says. "We have a deal."

"Not mine yet, I should say," Michael continues. "That… is how a store works, isn't it? You give me things and they become mine?"

"You have to pay for it first," his mum says, and the cruel ambition in her smile pales in comparison to the look on Michael's face, "but yes."

"Exchanges are important," it muses. "I'm sure we can come to an agreement."

"Glad to hear it," she says. "If you'll follow me." She glances up the stairs. "Gerard, don't block our way."

Michael's face flickers. Literally. Gerry barely catches a glimpse of what appears, but it could only be considered a face by virtue of the fact that it occupies the same location as one. Gerry steps to the side, and his mum brushes past him in the tight space. Michael, when it passes, brushes against him and lingers for a moment, so close that Gerry feels static zipping across his skin.

"Don't worry, Gerard," it croons in his ear. "This is a deal I am happy to keep." Then it's following his mum into the stacks of books.

Gerry follows. He has to. Call it the Beholding urging him to watch, call it a sense of fucked-up responsibility, but the part of him that wants to go to his room, shut the door, and turn up the music to drown out the latest in a litany of awful things that have happened in this house is thoroughly outvoted by all the parts of him that say he needs to literally see this through.

The stacks of books seem to bend around him, and Gerry sees more pathways than he knows exist. The only thing he has to hold on to as a sign that he's going in the right direction is that he started moving fast enough that he's able to keep Michael in his sight. But the sharp turns and the height of the stacks means he needs to be practically right on top of it to be sure not he's not going to lose it. And the longer he's close to it, the more he feels like the books are looming over him, climbing higher and higher and leaning inward, forming a closed tunnel. A throat. He sees flickers in the corners of his vision and hears a piercing but nearly silent ringing, which sometimes shatters into discordant giggling. He tries to manage it, wall off the terror with a dry observation that Michael is really hamming it up, but he is, in fact, kind of terrified.

His mum takes them to the study. Gerry wonders how she found it. He wonders if she even felt what Michael was doing. If Michael was even doing anything, if that wasn't a side effect of being close to a creature who has very clearly marked him for the Spiral.

Michael does not seem inclined to warp space in a helpful way, so the three of them are very close in the confines of the study.

"It sounds like you know what you're looking for," his mum says, as if the press of the bookshelves doesn't emphasize how much taller Michael is than her, as if she still cannot tell how carnivorously eager it looks. She's good at not showing her fear, which is one of the most basic prerequisites in this line of work, and she has a shit self-preservation instinct, which is also one of the most basic prerequisites in this line of work, but there's _nothing_. She should know better.

Unless she thinks that she is beyond death in all the ways that matter. No sense of consequences. No sense of risk. The worst thing that happens to her now is disincorporation, and that's not permanent.

"I don't often know things," says Michael. It doesn't even look at the bookshelves. Gerry can't really tell where it's looking — the angles don't work. Gerry, for his part, keeps looking at the desk, which holds the skin book in a locked drawer, and then trying not to look at the desk. "No one does, really. We all pretend, until we don't."

"Yes, right," his mum says dismissively. "Were you going to make a purchase?" She looks over at Gerry where he stands in the doorway. "Gerard, don't stare."

He tries once more to warn her, more because he feels like he should check if he can than because of any belief that it will work, that she would listen even if he was able to speak. He's not. His mouth doesn't even open, his throat doesn't even move. It's like he's forgotten all the motions required for speech.

Michael has dropped one of its hands onto the desk, and is tracing its index finger idly over the surface. There's no sound, but Gerry is certain that its finger is sharp, that it is carving something into the desk surface. "I do know you, Mary Keay," it says. "I know that Gertrude Robinson knew you. She's still watching you. It's what she's good at. Watching." It continues to trace patterns on the desk. Its index finger bends in ways that fingers should not. "She was watching to see what you had done to your son. When it would become bad enough that either she could intervene to gain his allegiance, or you would drive him to become something she should dispose of. But you… you weren't worth any effort by yourself. You weren't interesting enough. You were never a real... threat."

It digs its fingers into the desk abruptly, and when it raises its hand back up, the hand is long and bulbous, skin stretched taut over jagged and protruding internal features that Gerry only reluctantly recognizes as bones. It is holding the skin book, which fits in its palm.

"I do not like you, Mary Keay," says Michael. "And I am happy to deprive the Archivist of her tools."

It does… something. Space folds. The skin book… screams. Gerry thinks it's the book. It could be his mum. It could be him. It can't be Michael, because Michael is laughing and Michael is breaking out of its skin, until the body is a pale afterimage surrounded by patterns that expand and shrink and go on forever, infinitely themselves, repeating and hypnotic. They never intersect, but they feel the same, parts and visions of a greater truth — no, not a truth. It is not a truth, and it is not understandable, and it is not communicable, but it is the realest thing that Gerry has ever experienced because it is not pretending to be real at all.

Gerry's mind swallows itself, and he feels, for an instant, utterly content.

Then he's in the study (did he ever leave? Was he ever here?) and there are curls of skin on the floor. More than there were pages, sliced into neat, thin strips, but they're intact enough that he can still see the ink. There aren't words on them, though. He wouldn't have been able to read the words from the distance he's at, but he can see the branching trees and curls that have replaced them.

His mother is, of course, gone.

Michael is still holding the skin book, in hands that once more look human, paging through it with the vague disinterest of a person reading a gossip magazine while waiting in the checkout of a grocery store. "Do you want this?" it asks.

Gerry tries to speak and finds himself mechanically capable of trying, but so out of breath that he chokes on the first syllable. He hadn't noticed he was out of breath. He doesn't know when it happened. "What?" he finally manages.

"Do you want this?" it repeats, and holds the book out to him, barely gripping the end closest to it. The skin book is long and heavy and Michael is not holding on to enough of the book that it should be able to hold it out so steadily, but Gerry only notes that as a part of what he's seeing, not as something that bothers him. Not any more. He's too stuck in the shock of what's happened for such minor disregard for reality to upset him.

"No. Yes. I want to _burn_ it," Gerry says, and his vehemence both does and doesn't surprise him. He can't feel the top layer of his skin, and the inside of his mouth is tingling.

"Don't let me stop you," it says, and wiggles the book at him. Gerry walks over, distantly surprised by how easy movement is. He takes the book. He doesn't know what to do next. It's _polite_ to say thank you when someone does something you asked them to, but it's decidedly not polite to ask a monster to murder your mother and then watch it do so.

Her ghost was not her, in some ways. But it was still her in all the ways he wishes it weren't.

* * *

Gerry starts the work of moving out of Pinhole Books.

He can't sell the place itself — all the notice-me-nots on it would make showing it to potential buyers difficult, and taking them down and then trying to sell it would rapidly lead to questions of squatting and failure to pay taxes and 'hey weren't you that guy who skinned his mum's corpse' and all the banal dreck of the world people think is real. He just sells the books.

Selling rare books is not a quick or easy way to make money. But it does get easier when you're only trying to sell them, not build your own collection. And when you're mostly just trying to get rid of them. He could probably make more of a profit if he was willing to spend more time and work on it, but the trade-off isn't worth it. It still takes time, though, and looking for somewhere else to live does too.

As he slowly whittles down the stacks, he realized that the less books crowd the space, the less recognizable it is as the place where he grew up. Lived. Was imprisoned, take your pick. He hasn't ever seen some of these walls in his life. They're filthy, unacceptable even by Gerry's admittedly lax standards, so he starts cleaning them and tries to figure out whether cleaning the place means he's considering staying. He doesn't want to stay. But he also doesn't want to try to figure out how to make enough to pay rent in London with no formal education or work experience whatsoever.

There's always the Magnus Institute, he guesses. With them, his pedigree would probably be enough. But he doesn't know what he thinks about what Michael said to his mum.

He knows about Gertrude Robinson, sort of. Nothing Michael said sounded particularly out of character for her — none of the parts he understood, anyway. But Michael is a creature of the Spiral. Michael is not something to _trust_.

Neither, however, is the Magnus Institute.

Gerry is trying to sort through thoughts of his future and what he should do while scrubbing at some unidentifiable grime on the baseboards when the shrill chime of the doorbell cuts through the house. Upon checking the time, he discovers that it's two in the morning, which is basically the evening in Gerry's screwed up sleep schedule. He sets aside the cleaning wipes and heads down the stairs.

The door is dark, heavy, solid wood. The normal door. Doesn't mean there's not going to be something weird going on. There's almost guaranteed to be something weird going on. It's two in the morning at Pinhole Books, what _else_ is going to be happening? He opens it.

The person on the doorstep looks disoriented and nervous, which seems about right. "Sorry about the hour," they say. "Are you…" They reconsider whatever they were about to say. "Is Mary Keay here?"

"No," Gerry says. "What'd you need?"

The person withdraws a book from their bag and opens it. Before the cover is even halfway lifted, Gerry knows what's going to be on the bookplate. It's not prescience, not Beholding, just an intimate familiarity with how his life always seems to come back to those _fucking_ books. "Great," he says. "I'll buy it from you for…" He doesn't want the damn thing, but he wants this person to disappear and try to sell the book to someone else even less, "... five thousand pounds."

A flash of hysterical humor passes over the person's face, and then they compose themselves and say, "Wonderful."

"Great," Gerry says. He turns and heads up the stairs.

His mum saved a truly outrageous amount of money to be used for the acquisition of Leitners. She hadn't gotten any new ones in years, but she always kept an eye out. Had him keep an eye out. It's enough money for him to live off for a while, but not enough that he can use it to make more money in perpetuity, which is apparently something that can be done when you have truly ridiculous amounts of money. It is enough money that he can drop five thousand pounds on a book he doesn't want at a moment's notice. Since being legally dead made keeping a bank account potentially complicated and she didn't want Gerry to have all the money in his account, his mum kept the bulk of her funds in cash around the house. He'd known about some of it. He's found more of it in the process of emptying the place out.

All this is to say he expects to be able to go upstairs, gather some cash, go back down, take the book, and figure out how bad it is. Simple as that. He did not expect to find a new door in the study.

Great. Fantastic. That's exactly what he needs, for the doors and Michael to come _back_. Michael had left shortly after Gerry destroyed the skin book and released the collected restless dead, and he hadn't seen it or the doors since. He didn't expect it to stay gone forever. He's not that lucky. But seeing it again for the first time is a nasty shock. Apparently it wants him to know it's back, because otherwise he likely wouldn't have noticed the door right away, no matter how much it stands out. It's stained glass in a white frame, all strange and artful swirls that branch off and fold into themselves, getting smaller and more detailed but never seeming to end. Fractals.

At least this one looks nice, even if it's too colorful for his personal tastes.

With his attention split between the door and counting out money from the pile in the desk drawer, it takes Gerry much longer than it should to realize that the person from below followed him up the stairs. Normally, that would just be vaguely annoying, but he'd be able to reason that this person's probably having a rough time and not in their right mind. They look blank, lost, standing just within the study and, from the direction of their gaze, examining Gerry's painting. But the last thing somebody not in their right mind should be doing is standing in the vicinity of one of the doors.

"Hey," he begins, and then stops.

Behind the unlucky soon-to-be-ex owner of a Leitner is Michael.

"You're new," says Michael, and the person flinches violently.

"I was just… are you Mary?" they ask, struggling for something like composure.

"No," says Michael. "Are you?" It grins lopsidedly, taking in the person's evident confusion. Gerry counts the money faster.

"Er… no. I'm Dominic. Dominic Swain." The person extends a hand, inviting a handshake, and Michael's grin grows as it accepts. No red cuts blossom on Dominic's hand or arm, but the experience is not normal, judging by Dominic's growing look of alarm.

"Michael, don't harass customers," Gerry says, slapping the last few bills onto a haphazard stack and gathering them in his hands. He marches out from behind the desk and presents the absurd pile to Dominic. "Here you are." He does not offer a bag or an envelope. Dominic has a bag, and Gerry really doesn't care about looking professional or polite or like he's running anything resembling a legitimate business. He just wants Dominic away from Michael.

"Right, I just wanted to warn you…" Dominic says, and starts flipping through the book. Gerry is ready to interrupt and say he doesn't need any warnings, but then the book falls open to a stark, mostly-black image cut through with a pattern like frost or lightning. Gerry only has a moment to look at it before Michael's hand slams down on the page.

" _There_ it is," it says, sounding deeply satisfied. "What a nice surprise. I did wonder where it had gotten to."

The air of the study smells very suddenly and very strongly of ozone. There's a snap, like the sound of a lightbulb burning out amplified a hundredfold, and lightning begins to arc out of the book and up Michael's arm.

Dominic lets go of the book and runs. The book doesn't fall, held to Michael by the flickering ropes of electricity, bound to its fingers as the lightning leaps out with the eager joy of returning home. It forms flickering rings around Michael, inscrutable orbits with after-images that don't correspond at all to any shape Gerry has ever seen. He feels time bending, distorting — it's not slowing down, but his perception of it is, the better to understand that the incomprehensibility of the lightning is not solely due to the speed at which it moves but is a part of everything about it.

Then the last tails of lightning slither up Michael's arm and it crumples the page in one smooth motion, ripping it free of the rest of the book. The little leather-bound volume drops unceremoniously to the floor.

Michael eats the torn-out page.

"Why are you _like this_?" Gerry demands. It's not something he meant to say out loud, but it is a pure distillation of what he's feeling, so he has trouble finding the words or motivation to retract the sentiment.

Michael licks its lips with something colorful, long, and slithery that shouldn't be a tongue but Gerry really hopes is one. "That was mine," it says, like that should explain everything.

"The book?" Gerry asks. That doesn't seem right, somehow. It doesn't feel Spiral.

"No. The part of us that was trapped in it." Michael nudges the book with its foot. "The book belongs to the Vast. We usually get on, but the book stole from me, so I wouldn't mind destroying it. If you wanted me to."

"I was just going to burn it," Gerry says.

"That would work," Michael says, sounding somewhat disapproving. "It lacks artistry. But it would work."

Gerry is not interested in seeing more examples of Michael's artistry. "Cool," he says. "So did you just come here to do a little light eating, or what?"

Michael laughs like a cascade of marbles. "I want to be friends, Gerard," it says. "Friends visit, don't they?"

Well, shit.

**Author's Note:**

> rip in pieces mary


End file.
